9 ms·

While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking about a taboo. White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lo

• jug6ernaut 12y ago
  I am not going to deny anything you said, its almost 100% true. But I believe your missing an important "fact"(maybe). That is its not really physically/physiologically/mentally possible to put in 40 hours of true "work". Not consistently anyways. So as much as it is we not truly putting in 40 hours, its the entire effort to be available for 40 hours IMO that you are getting paid for.
  • ams6110 12y ago
    It is possible and commonplace in jobs where you physically work. Construction, any of the trades, factory work, food service... if you work 40 hours you have actually worked very close to 40 hours. There isn't any real opportunity to slack off or stand around in those jobs. Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.
    • jug6ernaut 12y ago
      I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscles in your body it is not easy to increase its conditioning. IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of. And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.
      • shkkmo 12y ago
        Many of the physical jobs also require a lot of critical thought. There is a reason why accident rates go up significanly the more hours people are forced to work. The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.
        • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
          It is ultimately very satisfying to see your complete roof, new shingles neatly laid across 5000 square feet. Or your plowed field ready for the planter, 80 acres of potential fertility. Even a half-acre neatly mowed. I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun.
          • waterlesscloud 12y ago
            Yep, that was definitely the great satisfaction of construction work- seeing what you'd done at the end of the day. It's worth a lot more than many might expect.
          • padobson 12y ago
            Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."
  • byEngineer 12y ago
    I agree. Maybe the solution would be to be paid per task completed. I.e. create a bug tracking system (just like JIRA) where employees (working from home) would bid for how much they could do the task in what timeframe. Something like desk but only company's employees could take part in bidding.
    • lsaferite 12y ago
      That seems like a horribly stressful way to work. It also reminds me of 'the Feds' from Snow Crash for some reason.
  • driverdan 12y ago
    That's not true. Some jobs may be too taxing to do for 40h but most are not. Even those that are extremely taxing still require the employee to do other tasks as part of their work (eg documentation / paperwork) that reduce the amount of intense work they must do.
  • furyg3 12y ago
    For sure, that's certainly one of the things that he misses. The midnight pizza deliveryman has a 'bullshit' job where he does nearly nothing because the 1 hour of real work over an 8 hour period is worth it to his boss. Most professional/service work has a large component of this type of availability. But yet we still try to maximize for 40. If we automate the pointless bits, we don't scale back Bob's hours to 20 and pay him the same. We expect 40 again (never happened in the first place) or reduce his 'hours' (read: pay) to 20. Maximizing for 40 is arbitrary for many jobs.
    • bryanlarsen 12y ago
      My google-fu is failing me, but I believe there's a study out there that postulates that the most efficient utilization rate for a secretary is about 40% -- in other words, they should be idle about 60% of the time. The thesis is that the primary purpose of a secretary is to be available to do work. When the boss wants something done, an idle secretary can do it immediately whereas a busy secretary has to finish what they're doing before moving on to the next task. Obviously the study contains a bunch of simplifying assumptions, but the general principle applies to many service jobs.
      • ArkyBeagle 12y ago
        Strange; Ethernet segments/collision domains start to have collisions at 40%. It's 1/e again, isn't it? <cue Theremin music>
    • lucasmoellers 12y ago
      The two delivery driver jobs that I had both paid per delivery. I was not paid to wait around. I would expect that if a delivery driver was paid per hour, that they would be given other tasks if deliveries were slow.
      • r00fus 12y ago
        I've done a couple of food delivery jobs prior to college - as a pizza delivery driver, I was paid to be available (I made boxes, did light cleaning and tried to look busy while I was waiting for a delivery) and got consistent ($4) tips per delivery (not to mention all the pizza my midnight b-ball crowd could eat). When delivering food for a small Chinese restaurant I was paid per delivery but there was a set run (usu. 4-6pm) and I got to expense miles, etc. No sitting around.
  • nl 12y ago
    I've worked agricultural jobs. We worked 8 hours a day, with a 15 minute "smoko" break after 2 hours, 1/2 hour lunch break after 4 hours, and another 15 minute break after 6. (This is in Australia, and was these were the award conditions) Except when we were on breaks we were continually working.
    • _broody 12y ago
      It's a lot easier to stay focused on physical jobs, if only because they keep your blood flowing. In contrast, office employees chug a lot of stimulants every day (coffee) and still manage to spend the afternoon fighting off drowsiness.
      • deadfall 12y ago
        I disagree somewhat. Repetitious physical work can make you lose focus quite easily and that is when most accidents occur. On the contrary, office employees that drink lots of coffee and being drowsy doesn't have to do with work necessarily, but with the their bodies being immune to the caffeine.
    • humanrebar 12y ago
      Fair enough, but can you do that until you're 80? And what happens when you have a serious knee problem or a pregnancy? I suspect it's exceptional that someone can do physical labor for 40 hours a week for 45 weeks a year for 60 years. The common response is, "Well, yeah, but you should retire at some point." And that's a fair response, but farm workers are severely under-charging if they expect to work for 30 years (to make up a number) and then be retired for 25+ years.
      • foobarqux 12y ago
        People worked in factories for 14+ hours of continuous work.
        • humanrebar 12y ago
          At what life expectancy? And, again, what happened if they were injured?
  • wastedhours 12y ago
    Exactly - I've come to peace with it that I'm being paid to be available for my 37 hours a week. As others have touched on, "knowledge economy" jobs aren't all-out work, so whilst my brain is foggy (especially after lunch) and I'm not accomplishing much, it's easy to think, for me, I'd be better screwing off outta here and doing something else. However, for a lot of it I'm asked for help or input where my brain's called into action for a few minutes a time every now and again by other staff. We know this isn't productive for us, but if it provides value to the organisation as a whole (usually by solving something relatively minor, which is best expressed IRL than through the screen), then that's what they need of me.
  • nilkn 12y ago
    It's most definitely possible to put in 40 hours of work. This mainly happens in more labor-intensive jobs. Note that it doesn't have to be construction work. Even your primary care physician's job might be described as "labor-intensive," just because they have so many patients to meet with and so much administrative work to do for each one. I'm sure many (most?) doctors do put in a legitimate 40 hours of work a week. As another example, when I was a college student there were definitely a lot of weeks when I put in a legitimate 40 hours of work. But it was distributed over many activities, from actually sitting in lecture, to attending office hours, taking tests, studying/reading, working on homework, and participating in extracurriculars. There was a ton of downtime mixed in, and there certainly were virtually no solid eight hour blocks of nothing but work. I honestly think a major impediment to office workers like programmers getting in a full 40 hours of productive work is just the environment itself. Just remaining stationary in an office for 8-9 hours a day is intrinsically exhausting, not physically but mentally. The worst part is when you have downtime, but still must remain stationary at your desk in the office. It now feels like you're working, but you're not. Your energy is draining, but you're not actually doing anything productive with that spent energy. (To be fair, I also frequently would do homework up to or beyond midnight, or even on the weekends, whereas today I very rarely do work for my employer after I go home, unless an emergency comes up or I just honestly am so interested in a project that I want to. The upside to the 9-5 workday is that it has a well-defined beginning and end. In college, there was never a feeling of being done, except maybe after your final final for that semester.)
    • toadi 12y ago
      I'm the same I'm a night person. When I was younger I operated the same as you. Chatting on irc during worktime and in the night do the work at home. But after marrying and getting kids I need the night time to rest... Beste would be I work at home so during the day time I can take a nap. The kid wakes up early. Bring him to school. I take a nap. Pick him up again take some time out with him and when he sleeps I work. But because I have to sit at work I have to work during my least productive time. Because I don't have the energy to do 24/7. So before marriage and kids I had 2 responsibilities. Going to work and actually working. But after marriage I had more and I couldn't cater it.
  • wutbrodo 12y ago
    I used to very strongly feel this way, but recently I'm definitely been choosing to put in that much time (and I mean actual productive time), despite being at a company/team that puts a strong emphasis on work-life balance (there are a lot of parents on my team and they're out the door at ~4:45 to pick up kids, etc). I think it might have something to do with the fact that I happen to be particularly motivated and excited about what I'm working on right now (more so than basically ever before in my short working life). As you said, it may not be sustainable, but I've been doing it for about 8 months now. It makes me wonder if the real issue is being able to do 40 hours of (relatively) unstimulating work, vs just 40 hours of work. I know for sure that I can't handle a tedious, brain-dead task for even half an hour without needing a break, and when I've had roles that were somewhat challenging but less interesting in, I killed a decent chunk of my 40 hours reading articles, etc.
  • duaneb 12y ago
    I don't think so. I've worked kitchen jobs working 70 hours a week—so long as you don't have to think critically the entire time, it's definitely doable.
• jseliger 12y ago
  White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours There's definite truth to this, but it's also true that, as many hackers have attested, moments of downtime and wandering attention are often where new ideas come from. Sample: I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something. For me anyway, a surprisingly large amount of time spent staring at walls or out windows may be "work" time. In addition, I'm a grant writing consultant (see www.seliger.com if you're curious), and a lot of a given day consists of pitching new work to callers, or editing, or waiting for someone to edit what I've written, and so forth. That stuff often isn't sustained attention per se, but it is necessary to the function of the business!
  • Zarel 12y ago
    Can't that kind of "work" be done just as well while doing yardwork or cooking or similar things? I don't see a strong reason to confine employees for 40 hours a week for that.
    • thaumasiotes 12y ago
      This relates to a personal pet issue of mine -- schools like to run surveys asking how much time you spend on homework. But, as far as I can see, the question is ill-posed. Take a non-hypothetical example: I'm given a math assignment, with the problem "prove (something complicated)". I look over the assignment, think for a few seconds about the problem, think "nah, that won't work", fail to come up with a different approach, and file it away somewhere in favor of surfing the net and watching my roommates play old console RPGs. Days later, a new approach occurs to me and I come back to the assignment. This time I'm able to prove (something complicated). Writing out the proof takes 20 minutes. How long did I spend on that question? I wasn't able to do the work immediately, so "21 minutes" can't be right. But I probably didn't actually need to spend several days having it in the back of my mind either. Maybe if I'd been confined in a little room with just me and the assignment I would have had it done in two hours, or five (really frustrating) hours. There's just no way to measure how long I spent "working". My quality of life goes up if I take the approach of "don't sit down to work until the solution serendipitously occurs to you", but, in an analogous situation, my boss might be a lot happier confining me in a room to sit "unproductively" for 5 hours and write ("productively") for 20 minutes.
• ryanmarsh 12y ago
  > So instead of going home early and cooking, working in the garden, bettering themselves, or watching tv, many show up to work and have strange meetings about nothing, conversations at the coffee corner, work unproductively on a tasks that could be done efficiently if they hadn't already been at work for 7 hours, or fuck around online while nobody is looking. It's great for eBay and Facebook, not so much for the kids in day care. “Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.” – Dave Barry
• yodsanklai 12y ago
  > Western culture really doesn't allow us to just show up for the 15-20 hours we really work and get paid the same salary as the 40 we say we do. There are exceptions. As an academic, I have that freedom. If I don't feel like working, I have no pressure to stay at my office. On the other hand, I often work during the evenings, weekends and vacation. I wonder how I would adjust if I had to switch to a regular job.
  • existencebox 12y ago
    As someone who recently shifted from an academic, paper writing position to a bigCo job, "Don't." That's really all I can say. No matter how good you think it is, it will break your spirit, and if doing meaningful work at a reasonable pace is what's important for you, you (probably, there are always exceptions) won't get it in the corporate world. EDIT: (I realize this is a very delayed response, but I've been mulling over this very issue for a few days now and it's something rather painfully close to home for me.)
    • yodsanklai 12y ago
      Thanks for your input. Actually, I've been considering making this shift, at least temporarily. I'd like to do something different for a while. But it probably won't happen anyway.
      • existencebox 12y ago
        This echoes a lot of the sentiment that I had when I moved, and frankly I regret it. I can't obviously know that all of our variables are the same, but for me, I lost the ability to work in a place that had a friendly work environment, with nearly full control over how and what I worked on, the ability to publish, AND work on a full stack, in exchange for a doubled paycheck and losing all of the above, this was simply not worth it and I spend most days here counting down until I've "paid my dues" and can go back into an area I feel more passionate about without burning any bridges.
• nkozyra 12y ago
  I think this also points to people with startups. Not working 40 hours - and yes, I mean real work - is often not an option.
• bane 12y ago
  I was able to spend the last 5 years or so working almost 100% from home (that's changed as I've switched jobs recently). I would say I easily did the same amount of work from home as I had in the previous jobs, but I probably really only spent 12-20 hours doing it in any given week. I think the key though is "available for 40 hours" as you say. Even if I was only spending a fraction of the time "working", the work didn't come in a steady state such that I could just hammer it all out in 2 days and screw off the next 3. I might have to spend 30 minutes answering a phone call here, or an email there, or run out to make a site visit to a customer on one day, and then spend that afternoon writing up a report about the visit, whatever. Most of the reason this happened is that, just like with any manufacturing job, you can't keep on steady work if your work inputs are delayed, and just like that, white collar jobs also have work inputs and outputs and they get hung up for all kinds of reasons, so you practically can't keep up a steady work tempo no matter how much you might want to.
  • cowabunga 12y ago
    Regarding your first paragraph, I'm right there now and proud of it. And that's exactly how it should be. I will say that this time is only available from ruthless automation and organisation. I spend the other 20 hours making sure I only have to do 20 hour weeks forever (startup).
• auganov 12y ago
  Only having a few productive hours during a day does not imply even distribution. You go even further and softly assume it's the first X hours that are productive. Doesn't sound likely.
• jobu 12y ago
  Unfortunately Keynes didn't take into account human nature as well as Parkinson: http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 TL;DR: Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
• superuser2 12y ago
  There was massive outrage a month or so ago when some conservative pundit got hold of information that salaried IRS employees working from home had been doing personal business (laundry, childcare, etc.) during their 40 hours. I don't think our culture will ever come to grips with this.
  • ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    The payload of conservative pundits is outrage as entertainment product. That might generalize to "all pundits"; perhaps the conservative ones just innovated and got there first. I see more and more people taking Randall Noe's tone in blogs and stuff. Here's hoping.
• collyw 12y ago
  Probably some of this is down to certain jobs requiring a lot more time than others. Some jobs may only require 15-20 hours week, but others like mine (building and maintaining a database for an organization), will never run out of work. If someone else were getting paid the same as me for half the amount of work, I would be asking for more pay. If they sit there bored for 20 hours, then I at least don't feel as short changed.